MAKING DIVERSITY WORK
Office of the Chancellor
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Diversity at UCSC at the Millennium
Undergraduate Student Diversity
Curricular and Research Diversity: Ethnic Studies
Appendix A: Members of the Chancellor's Commission on a Changing Campus
Early in the Winter of 1997, responding promptly to vocal student concerns that the passage of Proposition 209 would significantly harm this campus's progress toward becoming an educational community that both draws on and effectively serves all sectors of California's ethnically diverse citizens, Chancellor M. R. C. Greenwood appointed a commission of approximately forty faculty, students, staff, administrators, and community members charged to consider the implications of Prop 209 and to develop recommendations as to concrete ways in which the campus could continue to diversify its membership and to make educationally effective use of such diversity while complying with State and Regential mandates. Co-chaired by Professor Michael Cowan and undergraduate Catina Wilson, the Chancellor's Commission on a Changing Campus (CCCC) saw its task, as its acronym suggests, as being to "foresee" ways in which the campus could respond creatively and forcefully to the challenges of a diverse society at the same time that it further enhanced its strong record of academic excellence.
CCCC first met in February of this year and quickly formed five tasks forces focused respectively on issues of undergraduate diversity, graduate student diversity, staff diversity, faculty diversity, and cultural diversity in the curricular and research efforts. Each task force was asked to assess the present state of the campus in its area of focus and to develop recommendations as to how the campus could strengthen diversity in that area. The task forces met regularly during the remainder of the academic year, periodically reporting the results of their deliberations to the Commission as a whole. In May, the Commission sponsored a campuswide forum attended by some seventy students, faculty, staff, and administrators at which representatives of each task force presented the task force's preliminary findings and recommendations and responded to questions and suggestions from those in attendance. After a final meeting of the Commission in June, which provided the occasion for further discussion of the issues involved, the task forces completed their work and submitted their individual reports to the Commission co-chairs, who took editorial responsibility for gathering the individual task force reports into a comprehensive draft. This draft was circulated to all Commission members in October, and their comments were incorporated into the final document.
The resulting report is thus the product of many minds, and it is impossible to sufficiently acknowledge the creative contributions made to it by both Commission members and other concerned campus citizens. Some task forces were able to rely primarily on their own members for the task of drafting their sections of the final report. Some task forces reached out to make extensive use of position papers and materials generated by other Commission members. Whatever their various modes of discussion and consultation, each task force took its task seriously and creatively and produced important results. We particularly wish to thank the chairs and co-chairs of these task forces for their key roles. Neither they nor task force members received released time or compensation for this work. That they undertook this task in the face of the numerous other pressures on their time is a striking measure of their dedication. We also greatly appreciate the strong support of two members of the Chancellor's staff, Leslie Sunell and Linda Tursi, who juggled service to this Commission among a myriad other tasks.
Early in their work, Commission members agreed that their mission was not to complete the campus conversation on diversity or to develop a set of definitive recommendations. Rather, they agreed, their job was to stimulate further conversation, and to prompt appropriate action by various administrators, Senate committees, and other campus groups. Hence their decision to complete the Commission's portion of the campus conversation quickly, even if it left quite a few rough edges. Three such edges are in particular worth noting. First, the overall report should be seen as a cluster of individual reports emerging from the separate task force deliberations. It makes no attempt to wrestle individual reports into a uniform structure or style. Second, although each major section in this report corresponds to a specific task force's primary area of concerns, a number of those sections blend task force commentary and recommendations with other position papers on the issues. Third, the Commission members did not vote on the final report. Attempting to wrestle full consensus out of such a large and diverse group would have been pointless. Although there is general assent among Commission members to most of the recommendations, individual members also inevitably disagree on a variety on specific recommendations in the report. This overall report thus remains, in important respects, a self-consciously incomplete and even informal document.
We do believe, however, that we have raised many of the central questions that must be addressed if the campus is to develop a systematic and comprehensive strategy for achieving greater excellence-supporting diversity during the first decade of the twenty-first century. We can well imagine different plausible answers to these questions than the ones we have ventured, and hope this report will stimulate all segments of the campus community to continue to work cooperatively to seek such answers and to embody them in concrete campus practices. The critical thing is to develop answers that do the job: their success in doing so will be their final test. In ten years, the campus should be able to say: We are now a more diverse place and a better place than we were ten years ago.
Michael Cowan and Catina Wilson, Co-Chairs
The Chancellor's Commission on a Changing Campus
December 8, 1997
Introduction: Diversity at UCSC at the Millennium
Important changes are sweeping through America and the world, creating the need for highly educated people who can envision the opportunities arising from these changes. Our future rests with people dedicated to building community, who have the critical skills to function effectively in a world of diverse ideas, peoples, and cultures.1
Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change.2
In order to envision richer forms of community, students need to discover and learn to value communities and groups they may long have avoided--or never known were there. And they need to learn a long list of practical skills--listening, empathy, fairness, dialogue, conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving--in the face of disagreement.3
Today's students will live in a world which has changed in ways that make educational concern for diversity crucial. They will live in a society, and quite likely in a locality, of many ethnic and cultural traditions, and they will live in a world of highly interdependent national economies, supported by a world labor market characterized by unprecedented mobility. This will call for the ability to understand people of other backgrounds and their values. It is hard to imagine the 21st century as a workable enterprise without broad sharing of these abilities. A quality education must develop and nurture them.4
In its 1994 Self-Study Report, written in preparation for the accreditation review conducted by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, this campus asserted that
Diversity is an issue of special concern at UCSC. The state's changing demographics make it imperative for the University of California in general and our campus in particular to serve and be enriched by an increasingly diverse population. We aspire to create a campus community where all individuals will feel welcomed, supported, and respected, and where they will be able to contribute to and gain from membership in that community.
The Chancellor's Committee on a Changing Campus finds this to be a worthy aspiration. In fact, we believe that neither the UC Regents' adoption of Propositions SP 1 and 2 nor the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 are inconsistent with our continuing attempt to further the social and cultural as well as general intellectual diversity of our community. Although Regents' votes and State ballots have limited certain tools such as Affirmative Action that have been used creatively by this campus and the University of California during the past two decades, they have not challenged the goal of diversity itself. So we simply must develop other tools to do the job. The CCCC report attempts to identify some of these tools.
There is hardly unanimity about anything in a university. Vigorous, civil disagreement is a valuable consequence and sign of its status as a society of independent inquirers. Nevertheless, there is widespread support in higher education for the proposition that the university ought to foster diversity, at the very least as a means to other academic ends. The scholarly literature on the value of diversity to an institution dedicated to the generation, transmission, and application of knowledge is immense.
We thus write this report out of a deep conviction that, thoughtfully fostered, social and cultural diversity can contribute to the excellence of research, teaching, and public service that is the hallmark of our most distinguished universities. In 1991, an accrediting commission of the Western Association of Schools and College highlighted succinctly the positive symbiotic relationship between diversity and educational quality. We take the liberty of quoting a few of the commission's observations:
A quality education enhances students' respect for inquiry and helps them acquire the habit of critical analysis of data, presumptions and argument. Through interaction with individuals of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, both within and outside of class, students come to evaluate differing points of view. Immersion in an environment of diverse and competing ideas is essential to the development of independent thought.
A quality education prepares students to live thoughtful and productive lives in the kind of world they will enter upon graduation. It is a world of many cultures and ethnicities in which mutual understanding is essential to effective participation through a common citizenship founded upon integrity and moral purpose.
"Higher education can play a central role in the transition to a multicultural society. We can be at the forefront of efforts to extend access to knowledge incorporate the wisdom of diverse cultures, and build communities predicated upon respect for differences and upon shared commitments to democratic and intellectual values.
In this report, we focus our attention primarily on the value to our campus of the ethnic diversity of our membership and on our more effective use of our research and teaching to examine such diversity. But we firmly believe that ethnic diversity and studies need to be fostered in conjunction with other forms of diversity. A university needs to recognize and honor differences in academic interests, in styles of inquiry and expression, in viewpoints, and in physical and psychological makeup, as well as in social, economic and cultural backgrounds, and should in fact make the careful, critical examination of such differences as much a part of its research and teaching as any other subject. We therefore urge the readers of this report not to take our own particular focus out of the context of the rich and stimulating matrix of differences that vitalize our campus.
We acknowledge that diversity brings bumps and battles along with it. Like the larger society, a university with diverse peoples--especially peoples who bring histories of prejudice, inequalities, condescensions, and resentments with them from the larger society--is undoubtedly going to be a place where misunderstandings and tensions regularly arise. The challenge a university faces is whether it can keep these battles civil--keep sustained and healthy the serious, respectful conversation that constitutes the essence of university culture at its most worthy. Can we find points of common affirmation within and around these battles? As many thoughtful observers have argued, we can not avoid these tensions in a diverse society. Rather, we must find ways of working through them, not to eliminate differences, but to harness these differences for creative ends. Such a task is by no means easy. A university community is not and should not be a smooth, seamless structure. It has sharp edges, both intellectual and social, that can be good for the community if we know what to do with them.
Like the larger society, a university depends for its health on whether it can adjudicate individual rights and collective good--balance and integrate the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, with their stress on individual rights, with the spirit of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, with its stress on promoting the general welfare. The university must look for ways in which individual rights, including freedom of inquiry and expression, can contribute to the general welfare, and ways in which the collective health and strength of the university can support individual rights and the equitable distribution of such rights. To the extent that this campus can successfully cultivate a sense of community that honors and in fact fosters diversity, and a diversity that strengthens the community as a whole, we act as a tonic model for the larger society of which we are unavoidably a part. Working toward this goal requires not only wisdom but patience, compassion, and imagination, and even a spirit of adventurousness and risk-taking. We have written this report in the faith that this campus is up to the task.
We do not expect agreement on all our recommendations. But we expect that the administration, faculty, staff, and students will give them a serious hearing. We're not looking for easy answers, but wise answers, and those are most likely to emerge out of wide-spread, continuing, mutually respectful conversation on how best to make diversity and academic excellence serve each other. This thus is a draft in process, as is all research and conversation in the university. We recognize that there can be (and should not be) any "last word" on a subject that requires on-going conversation. Fostering on-going civil discourse is the critical thing. The process is the goal.
Undergraduate Student Diversity
5For colleges and universities, diversity means a new and deliberate inclusiveness of people, cultural resources, and curricular perspectives. Students learn as they carry on their daily lives, and they carry on their daily lives as they learn. Wherever possible they need to learn to live among and learn from the people they learn about. Accordingly, it is difficult to conceive of a college or university imparting the means to live in an ethnically and culturally diverse world without reflection of that diversity in its student body, faculty, curriculum, and in the institutional arrangements for living and learning together.6
Every university worthy of the name embraces a diversity of thought and opinion. As a public university in one of the most diverse states in the nation, the University of California has the further obligation of reflecting the mix of the state's population in the mix of its students, faculty, and staff. Both forms of diversity--a wide range of intellectual perspectives and broad representation of California's population in the academic community--are indispensable to our mission as a public university. The means we have used to expand the ethnic and gender diversity of the University have been the subject of scrutiny by the Regents and intense debate throughout the University, culminating in the Regents' decision to eliminate race and gender as factors in admission, employment, and contracting. Affirmative action was also the subject of a ballot measure, Proposition 209, approved by the voters last November. Proposition 209's constitutionality has been challenged in the courts and the outcome is uncertain. There can be no uncertainty, however, about the pursuit of diversity as one of the University's most important goals.7
I call upon the entire UCSC community to join me in ensuring the continued open access and academic excellence which characterize UCSC today. In the confusing aftermath surrounding Proposition 209, it is more important than ever that UC Santa Cruz communicates--and demonstrates--that we are accessible to all qualified students, and that we accept responsibility to join with our partners in all segments of education to prepare today's students for tomorrow's challenges. Drawing qualified students, including women and minorities, to UCSC is not about righting past wrongs. Rather, it is all about developing the talent we will need as a society to thrive in the next century.8
As one of the Commission's five task forces, the Task Force on Undergraduate Student Diversity was charged to: (1) inventory and assess the effectiveness of the campus's present undergraduate student services in recruiting, welcoming, empowering, and retaining students of color and students from other cultural minority groups; (2) assess what actions need to be taken to improve the effectiveness of existing recruitment and support services; and (3) consider what additional support structures are needed and present strategies for achieving such structures. This report will discuss in order the task force's response to each of these charges.
1) Inventory and assess the effectiveness of the campus's present undergraduate student services in recruiting, welcoming, empowering, and retaining students of color and students from other cultural minority groups.
University/K-14 School Partnerships
University/School partnering and collaborating is necessary if we are to make substantive improvement in achieving diversity in the UC student body. UC Santa Cruz is currently engaged in number of productive partnerships with our K-14 colleagues. In a relatively short period Chancellor Greenwood and other UCSC administrators have visited County Offices of Education, School District Offices, elementary, middle, and high schools, and most of the community colleges in our regional service area to see first hand UCSC's impact, and to learn how we can even be more effective.
UCSC faculty and staff are engaged in partnerships with local K-14 educators in about 100 individual projects that support math and science education and language acquisition in the schools--and, with a new $20 million project making UCSC the operator of the Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence, that number will only increase. The strategies UCSC uses involve our professors and their students, members of the staff, and administrators, including the Chancellor herself. We work with teachers, parents, and the chief executives of our partner schools, colleges, and universities; and we engage other research institutions, businesses and community groups.
UCSC has recently been funded a grant of $165,000 from the UC Office of the President to develop a partnership between UC Santa Cruz and the East Side Union High School District in San Jose. We selected the East Side District because of their large educationally and economically disadvantaged student enrollment. Last year Chancellor Greenwood visited the district office and met with Superintendent Joe Coto and his staff to discuss increased interaction between their district and high school administration, teachers and students and our faculty and staff at UC Santa Cruz. After the meeting she gave an informational UC outreach presentation to students at Silver Creek High School. Vice Chancellor Francisco J. Hernandez, Associate Vice Chancellor J. Michael Thompson, and Edward Aguilar from the Early Academic Outreach Program, a graduate of Yerba Buena High School (also in the district), and who organized the visit, accompanied the Chancellor. From our experience we have learned that it is beneficial when the entire campus community recognizes the importance of working with K-14, and also that the specific involvement of the Chancellor is essential as well.
Inventory of Current UCSC Programs
UC Santa Cruz has a history of developing and implementing programs that provide opportunities to members of underrepresented students. The following programs attest to the institution's commitment to the academic and social environment that is necessary to ensure the educational success of minorities and women:
The Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) has, since 1968, encouraged and assisted minority and low-income students applying for admission and has enabled them to achieve the full benefits of their academic experience once admitted to UC Santa Cruz. EOP approaches these tasks through comprehensive efforts at various educational levels. (1) The Early Academic Outreach Partnership Program in junior and high schools provides an ongoing advising and tutoring program for undergraduate students. The program serves over 5,000 students (grades 7 through 12) in 19 middle schools and 37 high schools on the central coast and in the San Joaquin Valley. Services include advising and counseling, tutoring, academic and college motivation workshops, SAT workshops, parent workshops, campus visits, and summer residential programs. (2) EOP also offers a five-week Summer Bridge Program for at risk entering minority students.
In addition, UCSC has two academic programs that are designed to prepare underrepresented students for college. (1) The Minority High School Student Research Apprentice Program provides stipends for six students from Watsonville High School to enable them to participate in research conducted by UCSC biology faculty. (2) The California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP) works with local school districts to design programs to encourage students to prepare for postsecondary studies in science and mathematics. Several projects funded by CAPP are designed specifically for underrepresented students. These projects have included the Santa Cruz Mathematics Academy, a specialized secondary program in mathematics for underrepresented students in grades 9 through 12; and the Gateways Demonstration Project, a program to increase the academic achievement of underrepresented students in ninth-grade science, language arts, and mathematics courses.
Since 1974, UC Santa Cruz has received grants from the National Institutes of Health for the Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) program. The program's primary goal is to train ethnic minority students in the academic and experimental aspects of biomedical research. During an eight-week summer program, MBRS students receive an introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of laboratory research. The students receive financial support and may also arrange academic credit for their work. Under the guidance of participating Biology and Chemistry faculty members, students develop expertise in areas necessary to function in a research laboratory. During the academic year, students work in faculty laboratories where they assist in new or ongoing research. A yearly national MBRS symposium allows students the opportunity to present their research to faculty and students from other programs in a setting similar to professional conferences.
The Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) program, implemented in 1980 at Santa Cruz, is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to assist minority undergraduate students in preparation for academic careers in the sciences. It is a highly selective honors program designed to support juniors and seniors who eventually plan to complete Ph.D. or combined Ph.D./M.D. programs and enter teaching or research careers in the biomedical sciences. Students in the program work with a faculty sponsor on an ongoing laboratory research project, often using their research findings as a basis for a senior thesis. The MARC program provides a stipend for the student, laboratory support for both the student and the faculty sponsor, payment of the students University registration fees, and a travel allowance that enables students to present their research findings at national conferences. Both MBRS and MARC students have access to the Biomedical Sciences Resource Office, which provides academic and personal counseling, MCAT and GRE materials, a library of biomedical-related careers, and computer terminals for student use.
Since 1982, the Chemistry Department has sponsored a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program specifically for upper-division undergraduate chemistry or biochemistry students interested in pursuing academic careers in the sciences. This program is currently funded through the National Science Foundation. Students are assigned to a research team including faculty members and graduate students, and conduct research under close faculty supervision in a laboratory setting. The students receive room and board, transportation, and a stipend. Course credit may be arranged with their home institution prior to arriving on campus.
Physics Undergraduate Summer Research Program, funded by the National Science Foundation, integrates undergraduates into existing research teams of graduate students, staff and faculty doing research in the microelectronics laboratory of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. The aim of the seven-week program is to provide a unique opportunity for hands-on research and group learning. Lecture and discussion sections will be used to enhance the depth of understanding. Eight to ten students are selected.
UC Santa Cruz's Minority International Research Training (MIRT) program funded through the National Institutes of Health and the Fogarty International Center. The MIRT program provides a mutually beneficial and stimulating scientific experience, as well as, personal growth, cultural perspective and scientific expertise for eight undergraduates, three graduates, and three faculty. Field research is conducted on the southern elephant seal along the Patagonian coast of Argentina. The program encourages minority students to seek advanced degrees and pursue careers of leadership in the biological sciences.
The Academic Excellence (ACE) program is a comprehensive workshop honors program for UC Santa Cruz minority students majoring in the sciences. Its mission is to increase undergraduate participation in the Natural Sciences and to graduate more well-trained underrepresented minority scientists. The ACE Program is modeled after the highly successful Professional Development Program instituted by Uri Triesman at UC Berkeley. Workshops are conducted in conjunction with entry level math, chemistry, physics, and biology courses. In these workshops, underrepresented minority students work collaboratively to solve worksheets of difficult problem sets. The students not only learn to master the more difficult problems and concepts presented in the class, but also team problem solving.
The California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) is a consortium of UC campuses, California State Universities, California Community Colleges, independent colleges and universities, and national laboratories. This consortium is funded through the National Science Foundation. UC Santa Cruz is one of four regional coordinating institutions in the state. UC Santa Cruz is currently developing academic year and summer activities for this program with the participation of more than 20 faculty representing all Natural Sciences disciplines.
With Cabrillo College's recent funding of their Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program, UCSC has begun to establish stronger ties with Cabrillo's minority science majors through a variety of outreach and academic activities. UCSC has now established a MESA Secondary Program (MSP) with funding from the MESA Statewide Office. MSP works primarily in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, but is in the process of expanding to other school districts in Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito counties.
The Society for Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) is headquartered in the UCSC Biology Department. Because of this we have available an extensive and active network of students and faculty from around the country.
UC Santa Cruz also supports a co-curricular environment that fosters the intellectual and personal development of students. That supportive environment is characterized by a concern for the welfare of all students, on and off campus; a commitment to student academic and self-development; a conscious attention to ethnic, socio-economic, and religious diversity consistent with institutional purposes; a responsiveness to the special needs of a diverse student body; a regard for the rights and responsibilities of students; and an active understanding of the interdependence of the elements of the learning environment.
Through this co-curricular environment as well as through its academic programs, UC Santa Cruz promotes multicultural cooperation and understanding. There are numerous social, cultural and political student organizations and publications that foster a social/academic environment reflecting various cultural backgrounds of the student enrollment. Several Student Affairs units offer support and advising for students in groups with special needs. They include: African American Student Life Resource and Cultural Center; Chicano/Latino Student Life Resource Center; Disability Resource Center; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Community Resource Center; Services for Transfer and Re-entry Students, and the Women's Center. The campus also sponsors four ethnic commencement celebrations to make the event of graduation a more meaningful and special experience for the student and family members (the Chicano/Latino, Asian, Native American, and African-American communities currently have special celebrations.)
(2) Assess what actions need to be taken to improve the effectiveness of existing recruitment and support services.
UCSC Outreach/Admissions
We must ensure we remain accessible to California's students. For example, maintaining a commitment to student access and efforts to ensure the academic strength and diversity of students accepted for admission are a major part of our enrollment planning effort. We must also ensure that there are no institutional barriers impeding student progress toward obtaining a degree. We continue to provide students with the opportunity to graduate in a timely manner, and offer quality student life programs which are directly tied to improving retention rates. We will continue to support the campus's effort to enhance diversity through a variety of efforts.
Our Admissions Office has implemented a Regional Outreach Model, which uses strategic efforts by geographic zone to target specific groups of students to apply and matriculate at UC Santa Cruz. A UCSC admissions officer is responsible for serving all Los Angeles County high schools and community colleges. He works with community based agencies and precollegiate programs to increase UC Santa Cruz's presence in a high-feeder area of California.
UCSC's Immediate Outreach Program, which works closely with the colleges and the offices of Admissions, Housing, and Financial Aid, is designed to increase the number of low-income and underrepresented students who apply and enroll at UCSC. Recruitment activities are held throughout the state at over 150 high schools and community colleges with large minority populations. Services include application workshops, preliminary review and evaluation of transcripts/academic progress, campus visits, assistance with the admission and financial aid process, and follow-up activities with admitted students. This program, along with the outreach component of the Admissions Office, has been greatly involved in diversifying the campus. In addition, the GATE Program (a guaranteed admission program for transfer students) was established to increase the number of underrepresented students transferring from local community colleges.
For fall 1997, UC Santa Cruz was recently funded $35,000, from both the Chancellor's Office and the UC Office of the President, for an intensive outreach recruitment effort called "Reaching Out for Our Future." With these funds UCSC will conduct specific outreach to underrepresented groups across the state. Most of this outreach will take place before the November 30 UC application deadline. This outreach program has four components: (1) "Taking UCSC Home" (high school and community college visits); (2) overnight visits (bringing high school students to campus); (3) "Leading with Culture" (ethnic student dance/theater group performances in targeted communities); and (4) phon-a-thons (fall/spring, to prospective admitted students).
The ultimate goal of these programs and events is to contact students coming from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as to increase the number of applicants to UCSC. All of these activities are part of UCSC's informational outreach efforts to encourage and motivate prospective students to attend the university.
High School Visits
For the past two years, UCSC has sent students to their alma mater during spring break, in a program titled "Taking UCSC Home." In 1996, 42 UCSC students participated, visiting 63 high schools and seven community colleges. In 1997, 77 UCSC students participated. A total of 79 high schools and 11 community colleges were visited. The 77 student volunteers were quite ethnically diverse: 40% Chicano/Latino, 38% Euro-American, 13% African American/black, 8% Asian, 1% Pilipino. UCSC students are encouraging high school and community college students to apply and enroll at UCSC. "Taking UCSC Home" is an excellent recruitment tool as well as a networking opportunity for students. Prospective students and counselors have found this program to be very rewarding. The following are comments received about the program from high school and community college counselors.
They all benefited. Keep it up! It is productive because students relate to other students, especially when they are from their school. --El Monte High School
There is so much uncertainty, and it helps them make a decision. Our underrepresented students especially benefited because they have so little to go by. It is helpful to talk with someone they relate to. --Andrew Hill High School
Students also had positive feedback about their own visits.
I was able to share my struggles in getting to the University, my life here, etc. It was great to see the enthusiasm on all the students' faces. And making them want to go to school: to believe that they can do it.--Angelica Enriquez
I was excited to reach out to students and have them realize that it is possible to achieve high goals. Having graduated from the same school they are in also provides a model, a hope of where they might be in a couple of years. --Jorge Grijalva
UCSC will again give students the opportunity to "Take UCSC Home" in the fall quarter. This will be done on a volunteer basis, with each student receiving a $100 gift certificate from the Baytree Bookstore. Student volunteers will be assisted in arranging their high school visit by an Admissions staff person. The staff cost of coordination of this program will be borne by the campus. While at the high school, students will share their UCSC college experience with prospective students: their first-year expectations, fears, class experiences, triumphs, etc. During this visit, prospective students will be encouraged to attend UCSC Preview Day, Banana Slug Spring Fair, and to select/apply to UCSC for their university education.
Overnights
Overnight visits will be arranged through Student Organization Advising and Resources (SOAR) and the ethnic student organizations, as well as through Admissions and the Early Academic Outreach program. Groups of high school students will be bused in from various areas throughout the state. Complimentary dinner and breakfast will be provided. Prospective students will be hosted/chaperoned by a UCSC student, usually someone of the same home town or similar background. The high school student will witness firsthand what college life really has to offer them as an individual. Prospective students will be able to identify whether or not this particular university meets their needs. Again, students coming from underrepresented backgrounds will be targeted.
"Leading with Culture"
Many of the ethnic student organizations develop programs and events that help educate the community about their culture and history. These activities help to create unity as well as awareness. At the same time, these activities are crucial in outreach and networking with their own community as well as other communities.
Los Mexicas, a Chicano/Latino based organization, and the Pagkakaisa Dance Troupe, a sub-group of the Filipino Student Association, provide a look into cultural history through traditional folk dance. Both of these groups go to high schools and elementary schools to perform dances and talk to students about the university. They talk of what it takes to get into the university and what life at the university is like. At the same time, they enjoy teaching these students how to dance traditional folk dances.
Rainbow Theater, African American theater group, the Filipino theater group, and Isang Himig are all student-operated theater groups. Rainbow Theater is an acting troupe with students from all ethnic backgrounds. The African American theater group is also an acting group comprised of students of African American heritage who perform plays by distinguished African American/Black writers. The Filipino theater troupe is similar except the student participants are from the Filipino community. All Rainbow and Filipino theater productions are student written, student directed, and student-produced. Isang Himig is a Filipino choir. All of these groups also perform for prospective students. Like the dance troupes, they share with the students their experiences at the university. These student organizations provide good role models for students and children. They also remind prospective students that college is not only about academics, but about life as well.
Phon-a-thons
There will be two phon-a-thons, one in the fall and another in spring. During the fall, students whose names were gathered from a variety of sources, including UC pre-collegiate programs, Peterson's student search list, and the College Board, would be called. In the spring, accepted students will be called by UCSC students, staff, and faculty. Phone calls last anywhere from five minutes to an hour. Phon-a-thons give the UCSC community the opportunity to talk to prospective students and their parents about their questions about the university. It is a great opportunity to get "up close and personal" with the students.
Retention/Graduation Efforts
Along with efforts to increase minority enrollment, the university is committed to the development of strategies that improve the retention and graduation rates of underrepresented students. Two major components of UCSC's EOP Pre-graduate strategy are the Faculty Mentor Program and the Graduate Information Program. Both of these Pre-graduate programs have been highly successful in improving student awareness of opportunities, and in providing the much needed advising for undergraduates interested in pursuing graduate and professional degrees. The programs utilize highlighted role-models within the undergraduate and graduate student communities, as well as involvement of UCSC alumni. They have become key in socializing students to the educational pipeline, and are integral components of the student community, utilizing a community networking approach of students communicating with students.
The Faculty Mentor Program is targeted at aggressively identifying, encouraging and preparing underrepresented and low-income students for graduate and professional study, particularly in preparation for academic careers. The FMP consists of two major components: (1) a Research Inquiry Seminar, and (2) the Mentor Relationship and Research Project Experience. This two-quarter program exposes students to academic research and academic careers through coursework, research experience, and a mentor relationship with a UCSC faculty member.
The Graduate Information Program is targeted at all underrepresented ethnic minority and low income students at the University, and offers the following services:
UCSC's Partnership to Ensure Access and Quality
On November 6, 1996, Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood announced a five-part initiative that characterizes UCSC's approach to ensuring continued quality and diversity among the campus's student body. The new program, "Partnership to Ensure Access and Quality," has two intertwined objectives: (1) to participate in the improvement of preparation for university eligibility; and (2) the active development of more scholarship funds to ensure access to UCSC for qualified students regardless of their economic backgrounds.
Specific elements of this initiative include plans to:
The task force is pleased that much of the Chancellor's Partnership program is already in place and yielding important benefits to students and the campus, and we look forward to its even fuller development.
(3) Consider what additional support structures are needed and present strategies for achieving such structures.
The Importance of Retention
The Task Force recognizes that several successful activities have already been initiated in the recruitment area, and that what is now needed is focused attention in the area of retention. Unless students stay at the university until they graduate and unless they enjoy academic success while here, much of the creative energy we have put into outreach and admissions efforts will be wasted. Therefore, any additional support structures should focus primarily on retaining and graduating students of color. With this as a priority, it is necessary for the campus to provide more financial support to student retention programs; promote efforts to integrate students into the campus; and institutionalize successful programs whenever possible.
There are a number of efforts currently underway with the sole purpose of addressing the issues of retention and persistence of students of color. In addition to the efforts mentioned earlier in this report, the following Enrollment Management Retention Projects were funded by Associate Vice Chancellor Thompson. The cost for these activities totaled $19,207 for 1996-97.
Academic Success Course
An academic success course will be offered fall 1997 for the 20 College Eight students identified as having the greatest need (at risk of being barred). The text is Becoming a Master Student by David B. Ellis, and the course focuses on strengthening academic skills such as test-taking, note-taking, reading techniques, writing skills, orienting students to academic resources, leading a class discussion, etc. Sponsor-- College Eight.
Attrition Study of Native American/Hawaiian/Alaskan (NAHA) Students
The objective is to increase the number of NAHA students who enter and complete their undergraduate degree. A nationwide survey of retention programs at other colleges and universities will be conducted to determine the programmatic requirements for successfully attracting and retaining NAHA students. Attrition rates at UCSC for the last ten years will be researched, to identify the causes of attrition at UCSC. NAHA students who left UCSC will be contacted to determine the principal causes of their leaving. Currently enrolled NAHA students will be interviewed by telephone and mail to determine areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. A report on findings will be issued to the Chancellor's Quality, Enrollment, and Retention Task Force. Sponsors--College Eight staff and Native American Staff & Faculty Association.
Chicana Latina Pipeline Project
The Chicana Latina Pipeline Project provides numerous programs and activities that enhance the academic experiences of Chicanas and Latinas and contribute to their intellectual and personal growth. The goals are: (1) to improve Chicana/Latino retention and graduation rates, and (2) to provide resources to pursue graduate studies and/or professional careers. The Pipeline Project is housed at the Women's Center, and has a work-study position to provide support services. The first task is to survey and map existing resources on campus. Another component will be a multi-level mentoring program between students and faculty, graduate students and undergraduates, alumni and students, and Chicana/Latina students and high school and junior high school students. Monthly support groups will be offered. A quarterly colloquia series will provide a forum for Chicana/Latina students to share their research projects. Students will be encouraged to attend and present at scholarly conferences. There will be quarterly workshops on career, internship, and graduate school preparation. Staff at McHenry Library will guide students through on-line resources available for research. A quarterly film or video series will be offered. Chicana Latina Pipeline Project Sponsors--Admissions Office, Anthropology Dept., Career Center, Chicano/Latino Research Center, Computer Science & Engineering, Counseling & Psychological Services, Crown College, EOP, Financial Aid, Health Services, McHenry Library, Re-Entry Services, Stevenson College, Student Affairs, Women's Center.
Coalition for Student Academic Success (CSAS)
CSAS was formed two years ago as an advocacy group for students for the purpose of supporting the campus community's engagement in the academic development and retention of at-risk students, and designing academic success workshops for frosh and transfer students. The proposal funds expansion of the academic success workshop series, trains members to be academic course facilitators, implements computing and study skills workshops, and creates various forums to better understand the retention needs of non-traditional and special status students. Sponsors-- Career Center, EOP, Counseling & Psychological Services, Disability Resource Center, Re-Entry Services; and College Eight, Cowell, Merrill, & Oakes Colleges.
Health Services Research Project
The objectives of this project are to determine to what degree the retention of UCSC students is related to participation in high-risk health related behaviors, research the correlation between retention and health issues, design a needs assessment for Health Services prevention programs, and use the results to educate the campus community on the services and programs that are essential for student access, enrollment, retention, and graduation. Sponsor--Health Services.
Other Retention Initiatives
In addition to the above-mentioned programs, a number of other retention strategies have recently been instituted:
What Remains to be Done
In addition to these initiatives, the Task Force recommends the following:
Our last point warrants further explanation. Most of the responsibility for the campus's present outreach and retention efforts have fallen on Student Services administrators and staff in Hahn Student Services and the colleges. Academic divisions and departments have been involved to a certain extent in outreach efforts, particularly through participation in academic advising tables and orientation sessions through such activities as Spring Fair and Summer Orientation. Individual faculty have volunteered to phone students in order to attract them to Santa Cruz. And many departments now have useful web sites that can be viewed by high school counselors, parents, and prospective students. But, with the exception of their participation in a few such activities as the SOAR and other mentoring programs, relatively few faculty have become involved in retention activities beyond those manifest in their offering of stimulating courses and opportunities for independent study, undergraduate group research, and thesis supervision.
Such directly academic activities should by no means be discounted. They are absolutely essential retention activities. Nor should the campus's offering of a wide range of high-quality majors of interest to minority students. Such academic activities are what the university is centrally about.
But there are other things the faculty could usefully be doing on behalf of retention, not only individually, but more importantly in their collective capacities as departments and Senate committees. The following are examples of steps that departments, with academic deans' leadership, could take to further strengthen their contributions to retention of a diverse student body:
These suggestions do not exhaust the possibilities, and we invite academic deans and relevant Academic Senate committees such as the Committee on Educational Policy and the Committee on Affirmative Action to explore other ways in which faculty, individually and collectively, can play more active and systematic roles in the attracting and retaining of a diverse student body.
The Approach of the Task Force
The Task Force on Graduate Student Diversity began by looking at the steps in a graduate student career -- for example, how do prospective students find out about a school, how do they evaluate it, what criteria do they use to decide on a school, and what determines success when students arrive? We then looked at obstacles that arise for minority students at each point, paying specific attention to new obstacles that may arise in the post-209 era. Finally, we attempted to generate new approaches to dismantling barriers faced by minority students.
The Task Force identified five major barriers faced by minority students seeking entrance into one of UCSC's graduate programs. In addition, we identified some recommendations for dismantling these barriers which should be successful for at least four of the five barriers.
Barriers Faced by Minority Students at the Graduate Level and Some Possible Interventions
The Task Force identified these five barriers (recommendations for dealing with the barrier are starred items):
1. Minority students may not know what UCSC has to offer in terms of graduate education. In other words, potential students from diverse backgrounds may not know about UCSC's many excellent programs, may not know what is possible to achieve at UCSC, and may not immediately think of UCSC when considering graduate schools.
In dealing with this barrier, the Task Force recommends a more concerted effort at outreach and at marketing the university to potential students from diverse backgrounds. Some specific remedies include:
2. There is a strong potential, in the post-209 environment, that UCSC will be perceived as having a negative climate and not being supportive of students from diverse backgrounds. In other words, Prop 209 and the action of the Regents, as reported in the national media, convey to minority students and their undergraduate instructors that UCSC is not for them.
In dealing with this barrier, UCSC needs to send a clear message that the university is for all scholars and that it values a diverse student body. Some recommendations for achieving this goal include:
3. The UCSC community may not fully appreciate differences in career paths of minority students and the value of diversity to the organization. For example, there may be a tendency for admissions committees to favor students from "prestigious" institutions which have low rates of minority graduation; letters of reference from schools which, for example, do not emphasis research but nonetheless have some very attractive students may not provide the details concerning the candidate typically used in admissions.
We recommend the following actions to address this problem:
4. There may be hidden biases and barriers on campus that do not promote the education of all students. That is, there may be institutions on campus that do not contribute to a positive atmosphere for diversity. It is to be expected that as the diversity of the student body increases new and unforeseen barriers may arise. Such a climate would result in a lower retention rate for minority students.
This potential problem needs to be explored and monitored. Some suggested remedies include:
5. Funding for minority graduate students will be severely restricted in the post-209 environment.
Currently, minority graduate students are supported in the Humanities and the Social Sciences primarily with GOF and Cota-Robles awards. These awards provide for a one or two year fellowship to the student and increase the recruiting money to departments that aggressively promote diversity. In general, these awards allow UCSC to compete successfully for the top minority students (although many of these students are receiving offers of 4 years of support from other institutions). In the Natural Sciences, minority students can be supported by Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need [GAANN] fellowships, which are need based, as well as by GOF and Cota-Robles awards. Under a strict reading of Prop 209 and of the Regents' mandate on affirmative action, these awards could not longer be given to minority students. This will place UCSC at a severe, if not fatal, disadvantage in recruiting a diverse student population at the graduate level. No matter how many students know about UCSC and appreciate its fine graduate offerings, it is absurd to believe that a highly-qualified minority student with an offer of two to four years of fellowship support from another highly-regarded institution would choose UCSC instead if we offered no or limited financial support.
The Task Force identified this as the most pressing concern for maintaining and growing a diverse student body. Without a means of providing funding for minority graduate students, at least at a level comparable to our competitors, UCSC will just not be in the competition.
Unfortunately, the Task Force was less successful in identifying means for overcoming this obstacle. Two possibilities include:
However, the issues involved in dealing with this barrier are complex. For example, at this stage it is unclear what will and will not meet the legal requirements of Prop 209. (This can be said for many of the recommendations made by the Task Force; for example, some interpretations would make any targeted outreach a violation of Proposition 209). In addition, funding of graduate students involves a number of layers of UC administration. The issues faced by UCSC are no doubt being faced by all of the UCs. Therefore we strongly recommend that
First Steps in Implementation of Recommendations
To keep the ball rolling, the Task Force recommends the following immediate actions designed to implement the recommendations outlined above.
1. The Chair of the Academic Senate, in consultation with the administration, should decide which committees (such as Graduate Council or a new committee) are best suited for implementing each of the tasks described above.
2. The Graduate Dean's office should begin strengthening recruitment efforts immediately. These activities should include:
a. Develop a tentative list of institutions to be targeted in recruiting. An initial list will be based on statistics on institutions that produce the largest number of minority student baccalaureate degrees. These lists should be among the starting points for discussion with faculty about the potential of possible recruitment sites.
b. Gather lists of faculty at institutions with large numbers of minority undergraduate students and provide these lists to the relevant departments to begin possible initial contacts for faculty networking.
c. Send a letter signed by the Graduate Dean and the Chair of the Graduate Council, enlisting the participation of graduate program directors in this effort.
d. Contact graduate departments to identify potential graduate student contacts.
e. Organize interested graduate students from a broad spectrum of disciplines and work with these students as an informal extension of the Graduate Student Diversity Task Force. Enlist the involvement of GSA in this effort.
f. Begin collecting relevant data on retention rates and begin collecting data via exit interviews.
3. The Chancellor should provide a statement of campus philosophy regarding the value of diversity. This will serve as a means of supporting efforts in this area and to demonstrate a continued commitment to diversity to a broad range of audiences.
4. The senior administration should begin discussions immediately concerning the issue of graduate funding for minority candidates.
The Task Force on Staff Diversity acknowledges that the campus already has a number of programs to ensure equal employment opportunity and to increase the diversity of staff with respect to sex and ethnicity. Because UCSC holds Federal contracts, it has current federally mandated affirmative action plans for women and minorities and for people with disabilities and veterans. But these plans exist not merely because of governmental mandates. USCC is also convinced that the presence of a richly diverse staff enhances the campus' educational climate for all its members.
Current Staff Affirmative Action Plans
The affirmative action plans for women and minorities, developed in accordance with Federal regulations, identify groups of jobs for which the campus staff is currently less diverse than estimates of the availability of qualified applicants in the normal recruiting areas for those jobs and specifies which groups are underutilized. The plan includes both campuswide and divisional analyses of problem areas and plans to address them.
The current affirmative action programs include:
The campus Affirmative Action Plan for Staff with Disabilities and Veterans similarly sets out efforts to assure equal employment opportunity and to support the hiring, development, and retention of staff in these groups. These efforts include:
What Remains to be Done
Although these programs demonstrate clearly that the campus makes extensive efforts with respect to staff affirmative action, the campus has had a persistent lack of success in increasing the diversity of campus staff. We note that the career staff of UCSC continue to be the least diverse of all UC campuses with respect to ethnicity. UCSC's location and high cost of living no doubt constrain our ability to recruit new staff, but the campus needs to identify ways to increase our diversity despite these constraints. The Task Force endorses Staff Human Resources' current evaluation efforts to increase the effectiveness of staff outreach programs and defers to their forthcoming report and recommendations.
While concerned with these problems of outreach, the Task Force focused its own attention primarily on what happens to staff once they are hired. What is the campus climate for diversity, and how is diversity perceived? How well do we welcome and integrate new staff? How well are the benefits of diversity managed and developed? And how well do we retain the staff we work so hard to recruit?
Again, the Task Force notes major constraints: the huge workload and related stress experienced by staff in recent years; a complex web of regulations and policies; and the effects of budget cuts. However, the group also notes that there are three areas in which the campus may not be doing all that it can.
Isolation is a problem for many UCSC staff, especially those whose duties rarely take them outside their immediate work area. With increased workloads, it is increasingly difficult for staff to put energy into organizing staff organization meetings and planning events. To the extent ethnic minority staff are fewer in numbers and scattered throughout the campus, social isolation may be an even larger problem. The Task Force explored whether the higher turnover rates for some groups might be improved with stronger initial orientation to the campus and introduction to networks.
The campus orientation program for new staff, eliminated early in the budget crisis, is minimal at present; HR is planning an expanded orientation program. The Task Force recommends that the vision of "orientation" be expansive, to include not only a program to provide information to staff, but also guidelines for orientation within the work unit; ways to familiarize new staff with the layoff of the campus (a campus tour, a map that includes walking trails and locations of specific offices); a new employee "buddy system," so that every new staff member has at least one person to show them around; and an individualized series of meetings to introduce them to staff, managers, and others in related administrative areas.
Once hired, current staff complaints have focused on two areas: the lack of domestic partner benefits, and the dearth of career development opportunities. With regard to the former, the Task Force has been heartened by the recent Regential decision to extend benefits to same-sex domestic partners. The latter problem, however, is less readily resolved. Staff report feeling that if they stay at UCSC, they may stagnate in the same job forever. Areas with high minority representation, such as Student Affairs, report that staff are type-cast, their skills seen as relevant only to student-related positions. Women continue to have difficulty moving into non-traditional areas of work.
The Task Force noted the availability of more extensive internship programs and staff development training at other UC campuses, but also the constraints of the current budget situation. The few UCSC career development programs (e.g. Career Development Workshops, Career Focus Program) can serve only a few staff, and most staff are unable to free themselves from the press of duties to attend. The Task Force explored whether UCSC could do more to facilitate staff career movement, e.g. cross-training, temporary job switching or job sharing, lateral transfers, campus-only recruitments, and a real promotional policy. In addition, we noted that campus Fair Hiring training might concentrate more on evaluating transferable skills of current employees so that search committees might be more receptive to staff without direct experience -- but with relevant skills and abilities --in the jobs for which they apply. And finally, the Task Force suggested that Human Resources explore ways of tracking and reporting staff training and development progress as thoroughly as they report affirmative action progress.
Current staff experience the climate for diversity at UCSC not as overtly hostile, but as limited, both by the lack of numerical diversity among staff and by limited understanding and appreciation of the ways in which staff differ. Staff wish for a climate more receptive to productive discussion of differences not only in sex and ethnicity, but also in sexual orientation, disability, age, class background, religion, and ideological perspectives.
The Task Force notes that although extensive education and enrichment programs are offered by the Diversity Education Program and other campus groups and offices free of charge to staff, attendance is poor at campuswide events and very few units take advantage of these resources for in-unit education. The heavy workload and "optional" nature of these events makes it unlikely that individual staff will make it a priority to attend campuswide events, and the lack of explicit planning for in-unit education ensures that unit workshops do not occur.
The Task Force felt it was important to make a distinction between "mandatory" and "expected" attendance at training. Mandatory training often guarantees that staff attend, but with resentment and resistance, exactly the opposite of optimal conditions for learning. However, when a unit head schedules staff meetings which include diversity training and communicates the workplace benefits that are expected from the participation of the unit as a whole, staff tend to be more receptive. The Task Force noted that in areas where Principal Officers have set explicit diversity education goals and given them priority equal to normal workload, events are planned and staff do attend.
Another successful model is that of a division-wide Diversity and/or Affirmative Action Committee, with representatives from varied units, levels, and kinds of jobs, charged with responsibility for planning and implementing each year's activities with respect to diversity education and other affirmative action efforts.
Recommendations:
1. Human Resources should make the campus more hospitable to new staff by implementing a more comprehensive new employee orientation, both to the campus and to the unit. That orientation should include active efforts to introduce new staff into the complex networks of the UCSC staff world. Hiring units should assign a "buddy" to every new staff member and introduce that staff member to key contacts in related units.
2. Human Resources should simplify campus policies and procedures and develop guidelines and programs to maximize the opportunities for staff to learn new skills, try new jobs, and move more easily (via transfer, promotion, temporary assignments, or internships) through positions with different job duties.
3. Human Resources should revise or augment the current Fair Hiring training to strengthen search committee skills in evaluating transferable skills of current employees so that search committees might be more receptive to staff without direct experience--but with relevant skills and abilities--in the jobs for which they apply.
4. Human Resources should explore ways of tracking and reporting to managers and principal officers the staff development and training taken by each staff member.
5. The Chancellor and principal administrative officers should lead the campus in making an explicit priority of diversity education: attend diversity education themselves; ask that campus managers set explicit annual goals for diversity education; and evaluate, acknowledge, and reward managers who make diversity education part of their units' regular activities.
A campus that has a diverse faculty in all fields significantly enriches the educational experience it can offer its students. Faculty from a wide range of U.S. and non-U.S. social and cultural backgrounds can bring diverse talents and perspectives to bear on the generation and dissemination of knowledge at UCSC. They can also serve as role models for this campus' increasingly diverse student body. This campus' commitment to academic excellence will be well served by systematic, creative efforts to further diversify the faculty.
Over the past twenty years, the campus' greatest success in terms of faculty diversification has been in the hiring of women. One third of the campus's present ladder faculty are women, although their numbers are spread unevenly over the campus' academic departments. Since 1990, over forty percent of the ladder faculty hired have been women. Most of these women, however, are still assistant and associate professors. Somewhat less than a quarter of the full professors are women, meaning that the campus has fewer senior women than would be desirable to draw on for positions of academic leadership. But, as the large cadre of assistant and associate professors steadily advance in rank over the next decade, the campus will have an increasingly rich pool of senior women scholars from which to draw departments chairs, Academic Senate leadership, and major academic administrators. The campus should make a concerted effort to encourage such scholars' assumption of leadership roles and should support them in such activities.
The campus has also made significant, if uneven, progress over the past two decades in the hiring of ethnic minority scholars. Of the new faculty hired since 1990, thirty percent are listed in campus records as "minority" faculty. Of the current ladder faculty, 22% are listed as minority faculty. It must be noted that most of these faculty are relatively junior--35% are assistant professors, 27% associate professors, and only 12% full professors. The campus must thus make a major effort to help junior faculty gain tenure and move into the rank of full professor and into positions of campus leadership. It should also be noted that the greatest progress to date has been in the hiring of "Asian" faculty (that is, both Asian Americans and Asian nationals), who constitute half of the "minority" faculty (about ten percent of the total campus faculty). "Hispanic" faculty, about thirty in number, constitute about seven percent of the ladder faculty and African American faculty about four percent. Only three ladder faculty are listed as "American Indian."
We should stress that it is difficult to measure the exact extent of the campus' progress in the recruitment and retention of minority faculty since the method by which the campus organizes the data it keeps on faculty members' ethnicity lumps under the category "minority" both ethnic minority faculty who were born and/or raised in the United States and faculty who were born and grew up elsewhere (i.e., "foreign nationals"). Certainly both U.S. minority scholars and foreign scholars enrich the UCSC faculty and the educational experience this campus provides, and both ought be actively sought. However, blurring the distinction between the two groups makes it difficult to assess precisely the degree to which "minority" faculty increases at Santa Cruz are due to hiring of US minority scholars. Informal evidence, for example, suggests that foreign scholars constitute the large majority of such hires in the Natural Sciences.
The campus data also does not sufficiently reflect the degree of the campus' success in retaining minority faculty it has hired. Informal evidence suggests that, in some areas--for example, Native American faculty--the turnover has been disturbingly high. The campus needs to improve its strategies not merely for recruiting minority faculty but for providing such faculty, once they arrive, with the academic, social, and other support that will encourage them to stay.
The campus also needs to develop legal alternatives to Affirmative Action recruitment strategies and to the "Target of Opportunity" recruitment program, which were highly successful during the 1980s in bringing to the campus a number of excellent faculty of color. The UC Regents' SP 2 and California's Proposition 209 in effect eliminated "set aside" positions targeted to recruitment on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religious preference, and national origin, and also significantly reduced the campus' ability to take such factors into account in regular recruitments. This legislation, coupled with massive budget cuts during the early 1990s, significantly slowed down the campus' progress in making the faculty more ethnically diverse. Many of the minority faculty hired over the past several years have filled positions vacated by minority faculty who left, so that the seeming "gains" due to recent minority hires may in fact be keeping the number of such faculty on campus at "steady state." In the forthcoming period of campus growth, new strategies must be added to existing ones to reenergize, within legal limits, the quest for faculty diversification.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Our task force recommends that the following actions be taken as a part of a comprehensive strategy for diversifying this campus's faculty:
Information Collection
1. The campus should revise its system of data collection on existing faculty, for purposes of internal campus analysis. The data should make clearer the dynamics of faculty retention and advancement as well as of recruitment. It should make clearer the distinction between "U.S" ethnic minority faculty and "foreign nationals" on the faculty, recognizing in the process the difficulties and dangers of drawing too sharp a line between the two groups. The data should also make possible the targeting of sectors of campus that would profit from greater systematic and creative attention to faculty diversification.
2. The campus should develop a comprehensive data base, or gain access to such a data basis, of pools of ethnic minority scholars in the United States, using the data bases of disciplinary and interdisciplinary professional associations, associations of minority scholars, etc. This data base should be available to all departments, administrators, and Senate committees that wish to draw upon it in the interest of improving campus diversity.
Academic Planning and Recruitment
3. The campus' academic leadership should explicitly and frequently stress the importance of having a diverse faculty to the campus' academic mission and its commitment to academic excellence.
4. This leadership, including the Divisional Deans, should work closely with departments to develop multi-year academic plans as a part of the current six-year planning process that, among their other important goals, will enable the departments to more effectively serve California's diverse student population and will enhance the departments' ability to attract and retain a diverse faculty.
5. In allocating new faculty positions to departments, the campus' academic leadership, among the many factors that will govern such allocation decisions, should give more weight than at present to a department's prior demonstration of its potential for and commitment to generating a diverse pool of excellent candidates, in terms of ethnicity, from which to recruit.
6. Beginning in 1998-99, when funds for new faculty positions are allocated to UCSC, this campus should reserve funds to reestablish a "Target of Excellence" or "Opportunity" program that will enable the campus, outside the boundaries of standard recruitments, to hire scholars who can demonstrably make key academic contributions to the campus. All campus departments should be invited annually to identify possible candidates for appointment under this program. In determining whether to authorize such a recruitment, the Executive Vice Chancellor will seek the advice of a specially appointed faculty advisory committee consisting of members from all the campus' academic divisions.
Scholars to be considered for recruitment under the "TOE" or "Opportunity" program would not be limited in any respect by race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, or religious preference. A department proposing a scholar for the program would have to demonstrate his/her excellence as a researcher and teacher, potential to serve trans-departmental as well as departmental needs, consistency with the department's mid-term plans, positive enrollment impact, etc. The department would also have to demonstrate the scholar's potential to contribute to the attracting and retaining of a more diverse student body. Finally, the department would have to demonstrate that such a recruitment could not be conducted through standard recruitment processes (e.g., because the department was not expecting to be allocated a relevant position for recruitment for several years). The EVC's final authorization of such a recruitment would require prior consultation with relevant Academic Senate committees.
7. The campus administration should continue and in fact expand its recent practice of setting aside recruitment augmentation funds for departments that, in standard authorized searches, can demonstrate creative and systematic strategies for generating a diverse pool of qualified candidates.
8. At the end of a recruitment, every department should be required to report on its actual search process and results and to evaluate its degree of success in generating a diverse pool. The administration should make an annual report to the Academic Senate evaluating the success of these recruitment augmentations and proposing changes that would make such augmentations even more effective.
9. In addition to such recruitment funding augmentations, the campus administration should assist departments more actively than at present in identifying and pursuing a diverse pool of candidates--e.g., helping departments locate relevant data bases, make more effective use of email, phone, and conference networking, make the on-campus interview process more appealing to candidates, make follow-ups to campus visits and job offers more effective, etc. The administration should also provide sufficient recruitment funds to divisional deans to enable them to make effective offers to departments' top-ranked candidates who, in addition to meeting other programmatic needs, will strengthen faculty diversity.
10. The campus should experiment with cluster hiring in areas where greater faculty diversity seems likely to result and where other important programmatic priorities will also be met. For example, a position identified in a division's six-year-plan priority list might be moved up in priority by the Executive Vice Chancellor if it can be "clustered" with programmatically related positions in other divisions' lists, and these positions can be advertised collectively. Search committees for these clustered positions might be encouraged to work closely together to insure maximum coordination of recruiting efforts and increase the likelihood that the top choices in each search would accept offers. Such schools as the University of Michigan have used this strategy with considerable success.
Retention and Evaluation
11. The Senate and campus administration, working with departments and other units and building on present orientation sessions for new and junior faculty, should collaborate to further improve the academic and social climate for women and minority faculty. Such collaborative efforts might include regularly scheduled meetings at which such faculty can express concerns; more effective mentoring structures; attention to unusual workload pressures that may affect such faculty members' productivity; the establishment and funding of research clusters that can bring women and minority scholars, as well as other faculty, together across departmental and divisional lines in ways that will enhance their research, reduce their sense of isolation, and strengthen their sense that the campus cares about their welfare. Departments and campus administrators should also devote more sensitive "early warning" mechanisms that will alert them to signs of increasing dissatisfaction among such faculty and enable interventions that will reduce the chance that such dissatisfactions will escalate into resignations. The Chancellor's and Executive Vice Chancellor's Offices should work closely with the Senate's Committee on Affirmative Action to develop such a comprehensive support program.
12. The Divisional Deans, or some other appropriate campus office, should undertake formal, confidential exit interviews will all faculty who resign their UCSC appointments. These interviews should aim at determining, in some detail, the grounds for a faculty member's decision to resign. The interviews should also invite the faculty member to assess other aspects of campus and departmental life that he/she believes affect the recruitment and retention of students and faculty. The results of these interviews, cast in a form that protects confidentiality, should be compiled and analyzed annually, and the report sent to department chairs, Academic Senate committees, and relevant administrators.
Leadership Opportunities
13. The administration should increase its present efforts to encourage minority and women faculty to assume leadership roles at UCSC and to facilitate their preparation for such roles. For example, senior administrators and faculty should personally identify and speak to such faculty about leadership opportunities. The Senate and administration should jointly organize small discussion groups at which minority and women faculty can discuss factors that inhibit their assumption of leadership roles and identify steps that might encourage such service. The campus leadership should also develop an administrative fellowship program that would give minority and women faculty a mentored opportunity to explore their own interests in administrative work and to develop further their skills for such work.
The above list of recommendations does not by any means exhaust the strategies that might be pursued to strengthen both faculty diversity and faculty excellence. Perhaps the most important single factor is the campus administration's determination, working closely with Senate leadership, to keep a commitment to faculty diversity prominently among the campus' explicit academic goals, to make certain that such a commitment is more than merely rhetorical, and to continually search for ways in which diversity and academic excellence can effectively reinforce each other.
Curricular and Research Diversity: Ethnic Studies
12Overview
In this section, we will be offering a series of recommendations that we believe are consistent with and in fact vital to the campus' achievement of its academic mission as a major nationally ranked university. Although we will discuss these recommendations in greater detail in the body of the report, it may be useful to highlight many of them at the outset:
The Place of Ethnic Studies at UCSC
Although we will be focusing in this report on the question of an adequate U.S. ethnic studies curriculum and research agenda for UCSC, we want to also stress the importance and value of the campus' courses and research activities that examine ethnic and racial dynamics in contexts outside the U.S., and of research and courses that approach such dynamics comparatively and transnationally. These activities also need to be coordinated better (with each other and with U.S. ethnic studies) and major curricular and research gaps to be filled. Although we devote most of our attention below to curricular issues, we want to insist that these issues cannot be adequately addressed unless the campus commits itself to an active, carefully coordinated research agenda in ethnic studies.
We also want, for heuristic purposes, to distinguish between courses focusing on U.S. ethnic materials and courses that serve significant numbers of ethnic minority students. Although many ethnic studies courses are of considerable interest to ethnic minority students, they also serve the educational needs and interests of many students who are not from the specific ethnic groups being studied. That is, these courses are integral parts of the campus' "liberalizing" curriculum, not of a "provincializing" curriculum. Equally important, a large number of campus courses and majors with no ethnic content at all--for example, courses and majors in engineering and the natural sciences--are very attractive to minority students and play important roles in their education. It is critical that the campus celebrate the great value of these latter courses and majors in making the campus an academically supportive home to minority students.
At the same time, we believe, U.S. ethnic studies offerings play an important role in student recruitment and retention efforts and in making the campus a well-rounded educational institution. No matter what their specialized interests, undergraduates will profit from taking comparative ethnic studies courses as a part of their general education. Many students, whether they are Physics or Music or Economic majors, will wish to take one or more courses dealing with the experiences and perspectives of people from their own ethnic backgrounds as a way of gaining greater appreciation of their own histories and helping them feel more at home in a university that honors those experiences by including them in the curriculum. Such group-specific courses will also be taken by considerable numbers of students not from those specific ethnic backgrounds as an important element in their liberal education. A smaller but significant number of students, both minority and non-minority, will take a considerable amount of work in ethnic studies as a part of their chosen majors. This campus has the educational responsibility to serve effectively all of these constituencies.
Equally important is the role that research and teaching in ethnic studies can play at the graduate level. A considerable number of first-rate graduate students, both minority and non-minority, have been drawn to UCSC over the past decade because of several graduate programs' emphases on various aspects of the study of race and ethnicity. Because competition for such students among nationally ranked schools is fierce, this campus will be well-served by further strengthening its graduate ethnic studies curriculum and research opportunities and by better coordinating such opportunities across departmental lines. The graduate students attracted to UCSC to pursue ethnic studies will in turn strengthen significantly the undergraduate program in their capacities as teaching assistants, resident preceptors, and role models for undergraduates. They will also make the campus more attractive to prospective faculty with research and teaching interests in ethnic studies. At the same time, the increase in faculty with ethnic studies expertise will make the campus more attractive to excellent potential graduate students (among them minority students) with such interests and increase this campus' competitiveness in drawing the best such students. And, by producing a cadre of PhDs with strong multi-cultural expertise, the campus will be meeting its responsibility to serve more effectively the State and nation, which has a desperate need to educate its citizens to understand the complexities, problems, and opportunities of a socially and culturally diverse society.
That the campus has unevenly met these responsibilities in the past has less probably to do with uneven commitment than with insufficient planning and coordination. This campus has to date not undertaken a comprehensive and systematic campuswide approach to the development of either an adequate ethnic studies curriculum or a coherent research agenda. For example, individual academic programs, on their own initiative, have mounted a variety of ethnic studies courses and sought on-going funding and ladder faculty positions to staff them. And the administration has, on balance, been reasonably if cautiously supportive of these initiatives. However, the administration has not worked systematically with these academic programs or with the Academic Senate to insure that the pieces add up to more than a miscellaneous and uncoordinated set of offerings.
The Senate's Committee on Educational Policy took an important step in the right direction this past year by expanding the "Ethnic Studies" section of the General Catalog to include an extensive discussion of curricular and extracurricular options available to students interested in this area, and a comprehensive list of faculty with teaching and research expertise in international or U.S. multicultural studies. However, neither CEP nor the administration has has yet taken formal responsibility for identifying major gaps in the campus' ethnic studies curriculum or for developing effective strategies for filling these gaps. The administration has not yet taken formal responsibility for trying to coordinate the existing curriculum. Without a systematic plan in ethnic studies, the ethnic studies curriculum is also overly subject to the vagaries of leaves of absence, resignations, and the like.
Similarly, with the important exception of the vital Chicano/Latino Research Center, the campus has seen no systematic initiatives to survey present campus research in ethnic studies, to better coordinate such research, to consider specific research areas within ethnic studies in which this campus could establish a world-class reputation, and to better publicize the campus' present research in this area. And no one has undertaken systematically to make the strengthening of ethnic studies research a priority in determination of new faculty hiring.
Our comments below therefore speak to some of the steps we believe need to be taken as a part of this planning and coordinating process in both curriculum and research.
THE UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM
Comparative Ethnic Studies
The one area of the undergraduate U.S. ethnic studies curriculum in which the campus can take some pride is the area that we might call comparative ethnic studies--that is, those courses that deal comparatively with the experiences and perspectives of ethnic minority groups or with the experiences and perspectives of both minority and non-minority groups. This campus had gradually developed a relatively rich curriculum in this area long before UC Berkeley passed its well-publicized and funded "Comparative American Cultures" requirement and certainly long before Stanford's recent and much-publicized development of a comparative ethnic studies program. Unfortunately, this campus has not successfully advertised this fact to prospective students. Some of these courses (quite appropriately) do not have "ethnic" in either their titles or their brief course descriptions, and the nature of some of these courses (except, perhaps, for an "E" designation) is not highlighted sufficiently in the General Catalog. In fact, a considerable number of courses that deal with substantial amounts of ethnic materials do not even (again, quite appropriately so) receive an "E" designation--for example, survey courses in History, Women's Studies, Sociology, and Community Studies.
But even if one focuses exclusively on courses with an "E" designation, the number of comparative U.S. ethnic studies offerings is quite impressive. Students can typically choose from over a dozen such courses each quarter, and from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. Even if one counted only the lower-division courses in comparative ethnic studies, students typically have at least half a dozen such courses from which to choose each quarter, and most of these are open-enrollment. In fact, one could make a powerful argument for eliminating the "E" designation from all or most upper-division courses (in a manner consistent with the IH, IN, IS, and T requirements) and for eliminating the "E" designation from all College Core Courses. Even by doing so, the campus would still be offering, at the lower-division level, plenty of U.S. and international ethnic studies course to enable all students to meet the "E" requirement with a considerable range of choices.
Group-Specific Ethnic Studies Courses
The weakness in the campus curriculum is not comparative ethnic studies courses but group-specific ethnic studies courses. Although it is educationally responsible for the campus to focus most of its attention on comparative courses, it is not responsible to offer less than an adequate base of group-specific courses, both at the lower-division level (for purposes of general education) and, in particular, at the upper-division level, to meet the interests of students in a variety of majors. Further, it is not responsible to allow such a high proportion of these group-specific courses to be taught by temporary faculty, who will not be available for follow-up work with students, supervision of senior projects, advising, etc. In no portion of the campus curriculum is there so much dependence on non-ongoing instructors. Even the campus' Writing and Language programs are built primarily on the expertise of ongoing lecturers.
Because of the dependence on temporary instructors (and it is often hard to find qualified instructors for such courses within the recruiting confines of the Bay Area), this curriculum is not only overly thin but overly unstable. Many of these courses are offered on an irregular and even haphazard basis, depending on whether a department is lucky enough to find a qualified instructor or on whether a ladder faculty member is on leave without salary and can thus leave "replacement" funds.
To gain a sense of the problems in this area, we examined the history of group-specific course offerings on campus from 1989-90 through 1997-98. Included in our examination was the level of those courses (lower-division or upper-division), the average enrollments of those courses, the number of those courses taught by ladder faculty, and the number taught by temporary faculty.
The most adequate (if only recently adequate) group-specific curriculum is in Chicano/Latino studies, mainly as a result of recent replacement hires in several departments and of the building of Latin American and Latino Studies. In 1997-98, there are about fifteen such courses offered by half a dozen departments, and that number will increase slightly in future years as two new already-authorized recruitments are successfully completed in LALS . The Chicano/Latino studies curriculum is still too dependent on non-ladder faculty (half of the courses in this area in 1997-98 will be taught by lecturers), but much of that problem will be addressed by the two new LALS ladder hires and the arrival of a replacement American Studies ladder hire in 1998-99. By 1999-2000, at least nine ladder faculty from six departments will be available to teach Chicano/Latino studies courses regularly. One or two new, well-placed appointments in this area (in addition to those already authorized) over the next six or seven years will stabilize campus offerings by allowing for ladder-faculty coverage for colleagues on leave. The biggest problem in this area is lack of coordination of these courses between departments and between divisions, leading to unevenly balanced quarters (in terms of number and kinds of courses offered) and scheduling conflicts.
The overall offerings in Asian American studies are not adequate in terms of number and curricular range. Even in a "good" year, the campus has not been able to offer more than three or four such courses a quarter, that number dependent in part on leave patterns. The one sub-area that is reasonably well-staffed for a campus of this size is Asian American history, which is taught by three ladder faculty from three departments. But only five ladder faculty overall have significant teaching competence in some aspect of Asian American studies. The campus has notable gaps in Asian American visual and performance studies, Asian American literatures, and Asian American politics, and no regularly taught courses focused on Asian American groups from Korean, Filipino, South, or Southeast Asian backgrounds, even though there are a growing number of students on campus from such groups and growing academic interests in these areas. Making one or two appointments during the next few years to fill the most serious of these gaps would be highly desirable. Over the next six to seven years, a total of three or four ladder appointments in Asian American studies would go a long way toward creating a reasonably stable curriculum of adequate range for a campus of this size.
The African American studies curriculum is also in poor shape. Although eight ladder faculty have teaching expertise in this area, most have other research and teaching obligations and interests that consume most of their attention, so that a good half teach African American studies courses only every other year--a major part of the explanation of why a few of the past seven years have had as many as eleven such courses and other years as few as four. This curriculum is particularly vulnerable to sabbaticals and leaves, since affected departments typically have no or few funds to replace such courses and/or can't find suitable temporary instructors from Bay Area pools. During 1997-98, for example, only two ladder faculty are teaching African American studies courses--out of a total campuswide offering of only six courses! Over the next few years, the campus should be making at least two new ladder appointments to fill the most critical gaps in the African American studies curriculum. Over the next six or seven years, a total of three or four new ladder appointments would fill major gaps in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Science Divisions and make the curriculum less vulnerable to leaves.
The least adequate curriculum is in Native American studies. For a number of years, in fact, this curriculum has been near or at a state of crisis. In 1989-90, things were looking up for Native American studies. There were four ladder faculty on campus (two just-hired) who were regularly teaching upper-division courses in this area, plus "soft" funding for several additional courses. But the resignation of one of these faculty and the retirement of another--neither of whom has been replaced--, coupled with reduced temporary funding in this area, has drastically reduced the available curriculum. Only four Native American studies courses are being offered during 1997-98, two taught by temporary faculty (whom it is very difficult to find) and two by a single ladder faculty member. The paucity of ladder faculty in this area makes that ladder position very vulnerable to turnover (two faculty have resigned from that same position over the past seven years). It is critical that at least one new ladder appointment be made somewhere on campus (most ideally, in the Humanities, where the resignations and retirements have taken place) over the next two or three years. Over the next six or seven years, a total of at least three new appointments in Native American studies would move this curriculum out of crisis mode and serve large student interest in this area.
Coordination
The gaps in the undergraduate ethnic studies curriculum are exacerbated by lack of coordination of this curriculum across departmental and divisional lines. During 1996-97, for example, twelve courses were offered in Chicano/Latino studies; but six of them were offered in one quarter, and several courses on similar topics were offered in the same quarters. Such lack of coordination is a disservice to students. It also results in inefficient use of faculty.
The affected divisions therefore should work closely with the Registrar's Office and the Committee on Educational Policy to develop a structure for more effective curricular planning and coordination, taking advantage of electronic data bases and email communication. Possibly departmental directors of undergraduate studies and relevant departmental staff should meet annually, prior to departments' submission of final curricular plans, to share tentative plans with each other and attempt to sort out scheduling conflicts and identify unanticipated gaps. It may make good sense to assign formal responsibility for facilitating this curricular coordination to some specific faculty or staff member in the Humanities or Social Sciences Division offices or in one of the major departments offering ethnic studies courses. It also makes good sense for the Committee on Educational Policy to undertake a more active oversight role in such coordination and to recommend specific steps to the campus administration for its improvement.
THE GRADUATE CURRICULUM
The campus' graduate offerings in ethnic studies are strong as far as they go and clearly help attract excellent graduate students to various Humanities and Social Science graduate programs. But, given the campus' size and stated interest in multicultural studies, they are surprisingly thin in certain areas. Augmenting this curriculum, especially if undertaken in a carefully focused manner, could significant enhance the campus' ability to attract and retain first-rate graduate students and, as we have argued above, also make the campus more attractive to a diverse undergraduate student body. A dozen carefully defined new faculty hires over the next six or seven years, distributed over a wide range of campus departments, could make a dramatic difference in this campus' reputation as a nationally preeminent center for graduate study and research in ethnic studies.
Like the undergraduate program, the campus' graduate ethnic studies curriculum is relatively stronger--and appropriately so--in comparative ethnic studies. Multicultural perspectives are built into virtually all of the graduate courses that deal with the United States. Even when such courses do not have "ethnicity" or "race" in their titles, they typically give substantial attention to such topics. Six graduate programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences presently offer such courses.
Even within this comparative curriculum, however, there are significant gaps for a campus of this size. Insufficient attention is paid to historical analysis, particularly of pre- and early twentieth-century materials. Despite a number of strong courses focused on race theory, the range of such theorizing is limited. Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of race and ethnicity could usefully be strengthened, especially given national and international scholarly trends in ethnic studies. Courses integrating social scientific and humanistic analysis would be especially valuable, as would courses dealing with political questions and courses focused on a wider range of modes of cultural expression. It would be valuable to increase the number of graduate courses in both the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as the Arts, that deal comparatively with U.S. and non-U.S. materials and with "disaporic" dynamics, but also the number of courses comparing the experiences and perspectives of specific U.S. ethnic groups, including dominant as well as non-dominant groups. The latter group of courses is one area, in fact, in which this campus might both take better advantage of present faculty strengths and achieve some national visibility.
The most striking lack in the campus' graduate ethnic studies curriculum is the paucity of group-specific courses. In a given academic year, only two or three such courses at best are presently offered by all the graduate programs combined. While this campus can never reasonably expect to offer more than a limited number of group-specific courses--and certainly cannot compete with the offerings of such major campuses as UC Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Michigan--, the value of such courses as "case study" areas for graduate students should not be under-estimated. It would not be at all unreasonable--and would certainly both meet present graduate student interests and make the campus increasingly attractive to potential graduate students working in U.S. and ethnic studies--to offer, on a rotating basis, at least eight or nine group-specific courses annually, spread appropriately over the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts.
The present graduate ethnic studies curriculum in certain areas is further weakened by the lack of cross-departmental and cross-divisional planning and coordination of that curriculum and by the lack of cross-departmental and cross-divisional discussion in the determination of faculty hiring priorities that might fill the major curricular gaps. Students cannot easily predict what ethnic studies courses will be available to them from one year to the next, especially in other departments. They cannot be assured of access to courses in other departments, or to the attention (often due to workload pressures) of faculty from those departments. The campus would be well served if the directors of graduate studies from these departments would meet periodically, with the active support of their divisional deans, to discuss and coordinate curricular plans, develop common policies with regard to such matters as course access, and identify the most striking curricular gaps that might be filled by assignment of present faculty or the hiring of new faculty. A representative from the Graduate Council might usefully sit with that body. The Graduate Council might also consider undertaking a more active oversight role in such coordination and recommending specific steps to the campus administration for its improvement.
Faculty Hiring Priorities
We have spelled out above a number of the academic grounds for hiring new ladder faculty with research and teaching specialties in ethnic studies courses. But it may be worth highlighting some of these grounds again, and adding a few more:
We believe that approximately one dozen new ladder appointments in ethnic studies will be necessary to insure a stable and reasonably adequate undergraduate and graduate curriculum and to create a critical campuswide research basis in this vital area. We are in effect recommending that the campus make an average of approximately two new ethnic studies appointments annually over the next six or seven years. We well understand that there will be many legitimate competing claims on the eighty-some new ladder positions that the campus should be able to fund over this period. But we do not believe it unreasonable to designate some fifteen percent of these positions to meeting the curricular needs and campus research agendas in ethnic studies.
We do suggest that, in making these appointments, the campus follow an important principle, one embedded deeply in our present educational ethos: namely, that we should hire faculty who can and want to teach more than "ethnic studies" courses--faculty, that is, who can meet other major departmental and/or inter-departmental curricular and research needs. Several considerations make this an important hiring strategy:
It follows from this principle that, if the campus decided to add, say, twenty new ethnic studies courses to the campus curriculum (spread over various departments), it would want to hire a minimum of ten new ladder faculty.
These new faculty positions should, of course, be distributed among a variety of campus departments in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences--the specific departments to be selected on the basis of departmental interest, programmatic considerations (research, teaching, etc.), enrollment patterns, and the other factors normally taken into account in allocation of faculty positions. Because, as we have argued above, the recruitments would target applicants with teaching and research expertise that not only included but went beyond ethnic studies, the recruiting departments would be able to use such appointments to meet other high-priority programmatic needs as well. The Executive Vice Chancellor, in consultation with the divisional deans and the Committee on Planning and Budget, should prioritize these annual allocations to ethnic studies recruitments and, over the next six or seven years, gradually work the campus' way down through these priorities. In developing these priorities, the EVC should take into account campuswide and not merely departmental and divisional needs and gaps.
An Ethnic Studies Major?
As last fall's student sit-in in the wake of Proposition 209 and on-going discussions throughout the past several years have made clear, there are a significant number of serious students at UCSC who strongly believe that this campus should establish a formal Ethnic Studies major or a series of group-specific majors (e.g., in African American Studies) and even a separate Ethnic Studies Department. They argue that the lack of such a major reduces this campus' appeal to potential minority applicants and may also contribute to minority student attrition. They also argue that the existence of such a major is necessary to increase the number of faculty in ethnic studies and to build sufficient curricular breadth and depth in this area. They believe that, without such separate programs, the administration will not feel obligated to hire additional faculty with expertise in ethnic studies. And they assert that ethnic studies programs provide an important social function in that they serve as sites in which minority students can come together and form a sense of community with each other. It is also clear that a number of thoughtful UCSC faculty are sympathetic to student desires for a separate Ethnic Studies major.
At the same time, a considerable number of faculty have argued that establishing a separate major will not be in the interest of the campus or its present academic programs. Several departments in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities already place considerable emphasis on multicultural perspectives in their courses and are eager to further expand this curriculum if given new faculty positions. These departments believe that, if new positions were given to a separate Ethnic Studies Department, the existing departments would be unable to gain much-wanted resources in ethnic studies. Further, they argue that, if present faculty were to be pressured to get involved in a separate Ethnic Studies program, it would spread them too thin and adversely affect their research and advancement. They argue that the present campus strategy of integrating ethnic studies into a variety of departments rather than "isolating" it in a separate department makes responsible educational sense and in fact, if pursued even more systematically and energetically than at present, could become a powerful and nationally visible model for other colleges and universities.
We do not propose to take definitive sides here in this charged debate, but we do note that the interested faculty have not, collectively, been invited to enter the debate publicly. We believe it essential that they be invited to do so. It is important that students learn where faculty stand on this important issue and not be misled into the belief that the campus' failure to institute an Ethnic Studies major is primarily the result of administrative decisions or indecision. In the University of California, it is the faculty who control the curriculum and the establishment of new majors. Faculty who oppose (as well as faculty who support) the establishment of a separate Ethnic Studies major deserve the opportunity to explain their views to students in a mutually respectful setting. We do feel compelled to note that campus administrators will undermine faculty opposed to a separate major if the administrators fail actively and systematically to support the alternative strategy of strengthening ethnic studies research and teaching in a variety of campus departments and of better coordinating these activities.
We have two recommendations to make in this regard that we believe may address some if not all of the students' and faculty's concerns and at the same time help the campus gain experience that will assist us in determining the most educationally responsible and effective longer-term course of action with regard to ethnic studies.
Ethnic Studies Minors
First, we recommend that the Committee on Educational Policy consider establishing minors in African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Native American Studies, beginning in 1998-99. Such minors have several points in their favor. For one thing, they do not require a separate curriculum: they can be formed by interested students out of courses presently offered by various campus departments. Similarly, they require no new faculty positions, since the departments are already providing the faculty. In addition, minors require virtually no administrative overhead--primarily a single staff member (likely a staff member of an existing department) who can keep track of students' records and also one or two faculty who can "oversee" each minor and certify students' completion of the minor's requirements. The existence of the minors will be noted in the campus' General Catalog and may thus be of assistance in recruiting students. Finally, these minors will enable the campus to determine more concretely how much present student interest there is in specific ethnic studies fields, and thus help the campus decide whether it should consider the possibility of a formal major in one or more of these fields.
Faculty Group on Race and Ethnicity
Second, we recommend the establishment of a Faculty Group on Race and Ethnicity.
In an era of austerity, when many different projects compete for the same resources, the most successful enterprises will be those supported by a large and coherent group of faculty. Large departments, for example, with successful enrollments or sizable extramural grants, are likely to have a proportionally larger influence on the decision making process than they otherwise would have.
For this reason, among others, it is imperative that steps be taken to mobilize a group of faculty who are committed to the overall health and growth of ethnic studies at UCSC. To a limited extent the Committee on Educational Policy, working with the Graduate Council, the Committee on Planning and Budget, the divisional deans and the Executive Vice Chancellor's Office, can catalyze and support this group. CEP, for example, is an appropriate Senate agency for advocating the strengthening of the undergraduate teaching of ethnic studies, especially in those cases such as African-American Studies and Native American studies where there is a critical need for strengthening the programs. Nevertheless, neither CEP nor other Senate committees or campus administrators can serve in the place of an organized group of faculty committed to strengthening ethnic studies.
By the same token, the study of race and ethnicity must be organized in a way that attracts the very best faculty to the institution. UCSC has successfully recruited excellent faculty in the context of a primarily decentralized structure. However, the time will shortly come where UCSC will be large enough to sustain, if it chooses to do so, one or more department or other administrative units (for example, research clusters or curricular coordination groups) that give focus and coherence to ethnic studies as a whole or to particular sub-fields. One must bear in mind, of course, that growth in one area necessarily comes at the expense of delaying growth in another. And so it follows that the campus needs a realistic ten-year plan of growth for ethnic studies that is integrated into an overall campus academic plan.
We therefore urge the administration to invite all interested faculty on campus to form a Faculty Group on Race and Ethnicity, with sufficient staff support to facilitate its work. Conceivably this group might be a sub-group within the emerging faculty consortium in Comparative American Studies. However organized, one should make certain that scholars interested in the study of race ethnicity in non-American contexts are given an opportunity to participate fully in the group. This group might be asked to identify and help coordinate promising cross-departmental research clusters on various topics in ethnic studies of interest to faculty and graduate students. The administration should be prepared to provide start-up funds for such clusters, some of which might prove short-lived and others on-going. This group should also be invited, working with administrators and relevant Senate committees, to formulate a coherent plan for ethnic studies in the coming era of campus growth. This plan should include a prioritizing of new faculty positions in ethnic studies that would meet the campus' most pressing curricular and research needs. It should include provision for strengthening the administration of undergraduate programs involved in ethnic studies, as would befit a growing campus with a commitment to excellence in undergraduate education. And it should include provision for strengthening graduate work and faculty research in this important area.
Co-Chairs
Michael Cowan, Professor, American Studies and Literature
Catina Wilson, undergraduate student, Oakes College
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Task Force |
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Bettina Aptheker, Professor, Women's Studies |
Faculty Diversity |
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Julia Armstrong-Zwart, Assoc. Chancellor, Human Resources |
Faculty Diversity |
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Lylace Blake, UNIX Systems Manager |
Staff Diversity |
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George Brown, Professor, Physics |
Multicultural Studies |
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Rosalee Cabrera, Coordinator, Academic Support, EOP |
Multicultural Studies |
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Diane Cameron, undergraduate student, Stevenson College |
Multicultural Studies |
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Pedro Castillo, Associate Professor, History |
Faculty Diversity |
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Valerie Chase, Copy Service Assistant |
Staff Diversity |
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Martin Chemers, Dean, Social Sciences Division |
Multicultural Studies |
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Christine Diaz, undergraduate student, Kresge College |
Multicultural Studies |
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Adrian Dorris, undergraduate student, Oakes College |
Multicultural Studies |
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Raymond Emanuel, undergraduate student, Crown College |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Kathleen Flint, graduate student/GSA |
Graduate Student Diversity |
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Lynn Fujiwara, graduate student |
Graduate Student Diversity |
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Michelle Handy, Associate Director, EOP |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Craig Haney, Professor, Psychology |
Faculty Diversity |
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Jorge Hankamer, Dean, Humanities Division |
Graduate Student Diversity |
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Gail Heit, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Student Affairs |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Ronald Henderson, Dean, Graduate Studies |
Graduate Student Diversity |
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Francisco Hernandez, Vice Chancellor, Student Affairs |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Celeste Hewitt, Senior Evaluator, Admissions |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Edward Houghton, Dean, Arts Division |
Faculty Diversity |
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Aida Hurtado, Professor, Psychology |
Multicultural Studies |
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Sigrid Hvolboll, Admin. Assistant, Lick Observatory |
Staff Diversity |
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Van Suzanne Nguyen, undergraduate student, Porter College |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Anthony Pratkanis, Professor, Psychology |
Graduate Student Diversity |
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Victor Rameriz, undergraduate student, Kresge College |
Staff Diversity |
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Valerie Simmons, Director, EEO/Affirmative Action |
Fac. Diversity/Staff Diversity |
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Michael Stevens, undergraduate student, Cowell College |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Jennifer Taylor, Porter College counseling intern |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Jan Tepper, Chief, UCSC Police |
Staff Diversity |
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J. Michael Thompson, Assoc. Vice Chancellor, Enroll. Mgmt. |
Undergrad Student Diversity |
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Mieka Valdez, undergraduate student, Oakes College |
Multicultural Studies |
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Tom Vani, Vice Chancellor, Business & Admin. Services |
Staff Diversity |
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Deborah Vargas, graduate student |
Graduate Student Diversity |
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Richard Vasquez, Academic Counselor, EOP |
Staff Diversity |
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Antonio Velasco, UCSC alumnus/UCSC Foundation Board |
Diversity Forum |
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Jo Ann Woodsum, Acting Asst. Professor, American Studies |
Multicultural Studies |
Footnotes
[1] A Declaration of Community: Report of the Universitywide Campus Community Task Force (University of California, 1992).
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper and Row, 1967).
[3] Carole Geary Schneider, "Strengthening Campus-Community Connections", Diversity Digest, (Spring,1967).
[4] "Draft Statement of Commission Policy on Diversity" (Western Association of Schools and Colleges, 1991).
[5] This section of the CCCC report was prepared by members of the Commission's Task Force on Undergraduate Student Diversity. Task Force membership included Raymond Emanuel, Michelle Handy, Gail Heit (Task Force Co-Chair), Francisco Hernandez (Task Force Co-Chair), Celeste Hewitt, Van Suzanne Nguyen, Ronaldo Ramirez, Michael Stevens, Jennifer Taylor, and J. Michael Thompson
[6] "Draft Statement of Commission Policy in Diversity" (Western Association of Schools and Colleges, 1991).
[7] President Richard C. Atkinson, "Perspectives on the Future of the University of California," January, 1997.
[8] Chancellor M. R. C. Greenwood, "New UC Santa Cruz Program Plans Partnerships to Prepare Leaders of the Next Century," November 6, 1996.
[9] This section of the CCCC report was prepared by members of the Commission's Task Force on Graduate Student Diversity. The Task Force membership included Lynn Fujiwara (Sociology graduate student), Jorge Hankamer (Dean of Humanities), Ron Henderson (Dean of Graduate Studies and Task Force Co-Chair), Brian McAdoo (Earth Sciences graduate student), Anthony Pratkanis (Professor of Psychology, Graduate Council Representative, and Task Force Co-Chair), Henry Rutland (Assistant to the Graduate Dean), Anouk Shambrook (Astronomy and Astrophysics graduate student), and Deborah Vargas (Sociology graduate student). CCCC Co-chair Michael Cowan joined the committee for some of its deliberations.
[10] This section of the CCCC report was prepared by members of the Task Force on Staff Diversity. The Task Force membership included Lylace Blake, Valerie Chase, Sigrid Hvolboll, Victor Ramirez, Valerie Simmons (Task Force Chair), Jan Tepper, and Tom Vani.
[11] This section of the CCCC report was prepared by members of the Commission's Task Force on Faculty Diversity. Task Force membership included Bettina Aptheker, Julia Armstrong-Zwart, Pedro Castillo (Task Force Chair), Michael Cowan, Craig Haney, Edward Houghton, and Valerie Simmons.
[12] This section of the CCCC report was prepared by members of the Commission's Task Force on Multicultural Studies. Task Force membership included George Brown (Task Force Chair), Rosalee Cabrera, Diane Cameron, Martin Chemers, Michael Cowan, Christine Diaz, Adrian Dorris, Aida Hurtado, Vieka Valdez, and Jo Ann Woodsum.
Posted March 11, 1998.